Mindy Mejia > Quotes

“Every book changes you in some way, whether it’s your perspective on the world or how you define yourself in relation to the world.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“MOST PEOPLE think acting is make-believe. Like it’s a big game where people put on costumes and feign kisses or stab wounds and then pretend to gasp and die. They think it’s a show. They don’t understand that acting is becoming someone else, changing your thoughts and needs until you don’t remember your own anymore. You let the other person invade everything you are and then you turn yourself inside out, spilling their identity onto the stage like a kind of bloodletting.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Evil is simple. It's a child's explanation for why people do bad things. The truth is always more complicated and worth pursuing.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“You can’t live your life acting for other people. Other people will just use you up. You have to know yourself and figure out what you want. I can’t do that for you. Nobody can.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“He said anything worth doing should scare you a little, and that some of the greatest stories began with a journey.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Ordinary men commit extraordinary evil all the time. Trust me.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“The thing no one understands, when your parent abandons you, is that it doesn't happen just once. They leave every day, every moment that you remember them is a door slamming shut in your face. And with every slam, you believe--a little more each time--that you probably deserved it.”
― Mindy Mejia, Leave No Trace

“silence ends an argument quicker than words.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Maybe our parents are only ever ideas in our heads, poorly enacted by the people who brought us to life. It’s unbearable, what we heap upon them, almost as unbearable as what they see in us. All we can do is hope the bonds tying us together are stronger than those constructs, outlasting our delusions and our failures, maybe even our lives.”
― Mindy Mejia, Leave No Trace

“They could be gone for years, healed over and laid to rest, and then out of nowhere the gun smoke stung my eyes, the wet jungle invaded my nose, and I had to bury them all over again. You could leave a war, but it never left you.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Ordinary men commit extraordinary evil all the time.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“You say you're just acting, but you're fracturing yourself into a thousand pieces, and every time I see another piece, you're gone again.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Mom warned me that I had a lot to learn about the world. I wished she would've mentioned how much the learning was going to hurt.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Her description of the trees echoed through the air between us, plain poetry that could have graced the pages of any number of pastoral novels, and I realized how beautiful she was, and how insignificant I'd become to her.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Maybe part of you wished they'd see past the act, even once, and tell you Bridget Jones-style that they like you just for who you were, but that never happened.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“No matter what strong means to you, find it. Find your strength, and if someone tries to take it away from you, hunt them down. Make them fight. Be the one left standing. And never, ever apologize for winning.”
― Mindy Mejia, Strike Me Down

“Every book changes you in some way, whether it's your perspective on the world or how you define yourself in relation to the world.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“I’d been to more funerals than I cared to count, and eaten so many ham and butter sandwiches I could practically taste the flour-dusted bun when a hearse drove down Main Street,”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Curses. Jesus. It took all kinds. There wasn't anything to a curse but words. Just like blessings and prayers and all the rest of it. People used words to try to change what they should be changing with their own two hands. And if the problem was too big to fix, no words called up into the air would make a lick of difference.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Every book changes you in some way. whether it's your perspective on the world or how you define yourself in relation to the world. Literature gives us identity, even terrible literature.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“For better or for worse.” Better or worse what? I’d agreed to adjectives. I’d happily squeezed Mary’s hands and made vows with unknown placeholders for nouns. For someone who aspired to be an English professor, binding my life to someone else’s with a game of Mad Libs suddenly seemed like a terrible joke.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Modern science says: “The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.” From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom. —Nikola Tesla”
― Mindy Mejia, Leave No Trace

“She had killed me, in so many ways, over months of guilt and obsession and need. She had taken everything I thought I was and destroyed it with a coy wink in the middle of a chaotic classroom.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“It was amazing how life simply kept moving forward. You could do the most despicable, amoral thing you'd ever imagined and just drive home afterwards.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
― Mindy Mejia, Leave No Trace

“women walking down city sidewalks with little rat dogs”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“The thing no one understands, when your parent abandons you, is that it doesn’t happen just once. They leave every day, every moment that you remember them is a door slamming shut in your face. And with every slam, you believe—a little more each time—that you probably deserved it.”
― Mindy Mejia, Leave No Trace

“People used words to try to change what they should be changing with their own two hands. And if the problem was too big to fix, no words called up into the air would make a lick of difference.”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“You say you're just acting, but you're fracturing yourself into a thousand pieces, and every time I see another piece, you're gone again. You turn into someone else, a crowd of someone elses, and it makes me wonder if there's any such thing as Hattie Hoffman".”
― Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be

“Belief is a powerful thing. It grabs you, unmakes you, changes the tilt and angle of everything around you into an entirely different geometry. You see the world in a new shape and no matter how horrible the belief, no matter what awful things it makes you do, a part of you is still grateful for the structure.”
― Mindy Mejia, Leave No Trace